Following a campaign from draft to sent

Every campaign moves through a set of statuses from creation to delivery. A send can take a while, and most of the time a status that seems slow is Letterhead doing its job. Here’s what each status means, how long each normally lasts, and when it’s ours to fix.

What each status means

Draft — the campaign is still being created or edited. You can keep adding content, refining the design, and making changes.

Review — the campaign has been sent to one or more team members to review and approve before it goes out.

Scheduling — you’ve started setting a send date and time but haven’t finished. Until scheduling is complete, the campaign stays unscheduled and won’t be delivered; you can keep editing.

Scheduled — the campaign is queued to send at the date and time you selected, and will start sending on its own.

Processing — Letterhead has handed your campaign to your email service provider and is creating it on their side. No emails have gone out yet.

Sending — delivery has started. On a channel sending through Letterhead’s own email connection, the campaign list shows a live progress meter that steps through 25%, 50% and 75% as delivery is confirmed, and updates itself about once a minute, so there’s no need to refresh. The meter moves in those jumps rather than smoothly, and it measures delivery, not just hand-off. A channel sending through a connected provider such as Iterable or Braze shows a plain Sending badge for the whole send, because that provider doesn’t report progress back to us; its own dashboard has the live counts.

Published — the campaign has been delivered to most of your audience and is available to subscribers (and on your archive page, unless hidden).

A normal send looks like: Scheduled → Processing → Sending (25%, 50%, 75%) → Published.

How long a send takes

• Under 5,000 recipients: Processing finishes in seconds, and Sending reaches Published within a minute or two.
• 5,000 to 50,000 recipients: a few minutes, mostly your provider’s delivery time.
• Over 50,000 recipients: 10 to 30 minutes or more is normal, especially on shared sending infrastructure.

To see what’s really happening during a send, open the campaign’s metrics view from the All Campaigns list. If the Sent count is climbing, the send is working and the badge will catch up. If Sent is at or near your audience size, the send is done and only the label is behind.

”Awaiting metrics” right after Published

When a send through Letterhead’s own connection finishes, the row can show Awaiting metrics in place of the Published badge until reporting catches up, usually within a minute. That’s expected, not a failed send. It never lasts more than about three hours; after that the row shows Published whether or not metrics have landed.

A/B tests have their own phases

An A/B test shows its own progress on the list instead of a plain badge, in this order:

1. Testing — winner picked in ~N min — both subject lines are out to the test group, counting down to the one-hour mark. Queue timing can make the countdown finish a minute or two early.
2. Picking the winner… — Letterhead is tallying opens to choose the winning subject line. This is normally quick.
3. Awaiting metrics — you may see this briefly as the winner’s send starts.
4. Sending the winner — the winning subject line goes to the rest of your audience, with the same live delivery meter as any other send.

The test itself takes about an hour; the winner’s send then follows the timings above.

Once a send is in motion

After a campaign leaves Scheduled it belongs to your email provider, so you can’t cancel it from the app, change the order recipients receive it, or edit what’s delivering (the content was fixed when Processing started). If you must stop a send, contact support straight away.

When it’s ours to fix

Contact support if any of these happen:

• a campaign is still Scheduled more than 15 minutes after its send time;
• Processing hasn’t moved to Sending after 15 minutes;
• Processing or Sending hasn’t progressed for 30 minutes and the Sent count isn’t growing;
• the metrics view still shows no opens or clicks well after the three-hour Awaiting metrics window.

Include the campaign’s Unique ID (shown in the All Campaigns list), your channel, and the scheduled time, and we’ll check the send with your provider. If Bounces are climbing quickly during a send, mention that too: some providers pause a send when bounces spike.

For the full journey from draft to published, see Finding your way around Campaigns.